Creating a new contacts database from scratch isn't bad at all- as usual, the tedious part is the data entry. "Open File - New Database - Create a new database- Register the database for me and open the database for editing". Base has a pretty good wizard; click on the Tables icon and then select Use Wizard to Create Table. This contains a batch of templates for all different types of databases, including Contacts, like in Figure 3. Note that there are up/down arrows for putting your fields in the order you want.

Anytime you want to do a clean do-over, go into Tools - Options - OpenOffice.org Base - Databases to delete any databases you want to get rid of. You can't just delete them via the usual means, like from a file manager or using the rm command, because databases are registered with Base. So when you remove one it must be un-registered.